Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @05:24PM
from the in-the-beginning dept.

MrSeb writes "In the time of Socrates, Plato and Cicero, great minds came together in local forums or sophist schools. The Enlightenment of the 18th century was triggered by homely gatherings at salons and fueled by the steaming hotpot of coffeehouses and caffeine. Today we still use forums, of course, and plenty of inventions and insight still originate from coffeehouses, but most innovation occurs in laboratories. ExtremeTech takes a look at the six computer labs that gave birth to the digital world — from Bletchley Park in Blighty, to PARC labs in Palo Alto, and everything in between."

I briefly visited San José and San Fransisco in 2003 for the Game Developers Conference. I phoned Xerox PARC to inquire whether they had guided tours, but they didn't (I guess maybe parts of it were still operational/considered company secrets?). Later I was able to visit Macromedia's office which was a huge thrill, although basically it was simply an office, nothing very special to see. To me it meant much, being a Flash developer from Amsterdam in those days I was very excited to meet the people who

There are two ways anyone can visit PARC:1. PARC Forum every Thursday http://www.parc.com/events/forum.html [parc.com]
Not a guided tour, but you get to ask questions. And the talks are available for viewing afterward.
I've asked questions of Guido van Rossum (a famous Dutchman no doubt you know) and Jill Tarter (SETI), and dozens of others.2. Art exhibits
There are art exhibits occasionally and they have guided tours of the art on specified days.
You don't get to ask any questions; it's just an art exhibit space.

Intel has a small museum you can visit, and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View is a must-see.The Tech computer museum in San Jose is iffy even if you have kids (exhibits aren't well maintained) though the imax theatre there is nice.

I briefly visited San José and San Fransisco in 2003 [...]. I phoned Xerox PARC to inquire whether they had guided tours, but they didn't...

At the suggestion of a friend from the PLATO IV project (Hi, Mike!) I visited PARC in September of 1974. Not knowing anything about it I walked up to the front desk and asked if I could have a tour. The nice lady asked where I was working and I said I had just moved to the area and didn't have a job yet. She said she would see if there was someone who had some time.

About 15 minutes later this nice guy came out and proceeded to give me about a 2.5 hour tour. I was not only amazed at the tech they had, but

Well they had an add-on mouse-based desktop program and "mousepaint" in 1983 or so to go along with the original Apple mouse card, but Apple first implemented the windows/mouse interface in 1982 with the Lisa.

they had a sparse few GUI programs on the 8 bit II's, the IIc came with a mouse port standard in 84, the apple II mouse card was developed about the same time as machintosh (1981 according to folklore)

This is another one of those "top N, one per page, ads on every page" ad farm trolls.

Their list isn't too impressive, either. Bell Labs, yes. IBM Watson, yes. PARC, yes. But where's the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, from which came ENIAC, and the beginnings of UNIVAC, the first commercial electronic computer to go into production? Also, Bletchly Park wasn't that influential because nobody knew about it until the 1970s.

What we call a "computer" today is properly a stored-program general purpose digital computer. There were machines built before that which had some, but not all, of those attributes.
Bletchley Park's machines fall into that category). The WWII US crypto operation was at Arlington Hall, which did more hardware development than Bletchley Park. were developed. They were using punched cards where Bletchley used people and filing cabinets, and they seem to have developed digital magnetic tape, although the history there is cloudy. NSA is the direct descendant of Arlington Hall.

Another major pre-computer computing company
was Teleregister, which was a spinoff from Western Union in 1949. They pioneered "remote computing" for stock quotations, railroad ticketing, and airline ticketing. Their Magnetronic Reservisor was the first big remote-access system, with magnetic drums holding the reservation data.

I dont claim anything of the sort - I must say, AC, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel here, the post you are replying to is fact. Manchesters contributions to computing and economics are so solid that if you cant be bothered checking my facts you deserve to live the American fantasy, and you will take the consequences of trying to rewrite history with the rest of your brethren. The world has had enough of everything you are doing, not just rewriting the past. Your 'military might' is stretched as it